Raising temperatures and low rainfall negatively impacts any reforestation project. In 2025, a severe drought and a long-lasting forest fire in Lurë-Dejës Mt. National Park significantly reduced the survival of saplings planted during the 2024 autumn planting season. This project monitors differences in soil moisture and temperature between saplings where we used soil cover and without soil cover.
| Without cover | With cover | |
|---|---|---|
| Average volumetric water content | 23.0% | 26.2% |
| Readings below Drought threshold | 11.4% | 0.0% |
| Readings below Permanent wilting point | 0.00% | 0.00% |
Summary statistics are calculated from matched timestamps only (2519 readings).
| Without cover | With cover | |
|---|---|---|
| Average soil temperature | 17.77 °C | 16.97 °C |
| Minimum soil temperature | 6.54 °C | 7.79 °C |
| Maximum soil temperature | 30.96 °C | 27.88 °C |
| Readings above 30 °C | 0.3% | 0.0% |
| Readings above 35 °C | 0.00% | 0.00% |
Temperature statistics are calculated from matched timestamps only (2519 readings). Daytime and nighttime are based on Europe/Tirane local time (06:00-19:59 day, 20:00-05:59 night).
In 2025, a severe drought and a long-lasting forest fire in Lurë-Dejës Mt. National Park reduced the survival of saplings planted during the 2024 autumn planting season. The most affected areas were open, exposed sites with little surrounding vegetation or tree cover.
Unfortunately as we work on fire damaged areas, we cannot avoid planting in these exposed areas, which needs the restoration the most.
While we can not control the weather, we can improve the conditions for saplings in these exposed areas. Irrigation is not a viable option as rivers and streams in these areas dry up during the summer. Therefore we are testing whether soil cover can help retain soil moisture and reduce soil temperature during the summer.
To better understand the conditions in these planting areas, we installed TMS-4 dataloggers sensors from TOMST s.r.o. which allow us to following attributes:
Sensors are set to record measurements every 15 minutes and the data is collected during our field visits. The raw soil moisture readings are converted to volumetric water content using the myClim R package which was developed for the TMS-4 dataloggers and it's methodology has been published in this paper.
The sensors were installed in one of our most exposed planting areas, which has been re-forested in autumn 2024 and in 2025 we had to replace more than 70% of trees.
In this area we planted 2 year-old Black pine saplings from our tree nursery in 30 x 30 x 30 cm planting holes, which is a standard planting technique for Black pine in Albania. Due to a large disturbed surface the soil dries out quickly and the saplings are exposed to high temperatures and low humidity.
One sensor monitors a sapling with soil cover, and the other monitors a sapling in soil without cover.
During our seed collection activities we collect large amount of cones for different tree species. After seeds are extracted this material is a waste which have been used in the past for firewood or left to decompose.
As Silver fir cones break down during the seed extraction into small pieces we can use it as a mulch material without any additional processing. Cones from Pine species will require breaking down into smaller pieces before they can be used as a soil cover material.
As cover material we decided to reuse waste from Silver fir seed collection for this pilot.
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Updated: 03 Jul 26, 20:11 GMT+0
Version: fe4889d
